In addition, Rap music reflects a running conversation and commentary on authenticity. Rap music sparked new conversations about race and authenticity, gender, sexuality, and respectability, social problems such as police brutality, as well as Black and Latinx youth’s relationship to politics, technology, and the economy. Other marginalized groups such as genderqueer people have remained on the margins of the rap industry. This process has led women artists not only to use rap to critique sexism within the culture, but also to contribute to the development of intersectional feminism. This has not stopped women from participating despite often vacillating between the margins and center of rap music. The rap industry also suffers from gender inequities as fewer women have been able to pursue a lengthy career rapping and producing. Much of rap music performed by men has raised questions about masculinity because of the prominence of sexist, homophobic, and misogynist lyrics. Historically, rap music and hip hop culture have been a male-dominated realm. 1 Black and Latinx youth in New York City, many of them Caribbean immigrants, responded to poverty, urban renewal, deindustrialization, and inner-city violence by creating their own cultural practices-throwing parties featuring DJs playing breakbeats, MCs rapping and regulating the crowd, dancers breaking to the beat, and graffiti artists tagging trains and walls. Rap music is an example of what scholars have called polyculturalism, which refers to the notion that various racial and ethnic groups have historically exchanged and borrowed ideas and cultural practices. Rap is the musical practice of hip hop culture that features a vocalist, or master of ceremony (MC), reciting lyrics over a beat. Rap music has also sparked new conversations about various issues such as electoral politics, gender and sexuality, crime, policing, and mass incarceration, as well as technology. Many artists have enjoyed crossover success in acting, advertising, and business. Despite efforts to demonize and censor rap music and hip hop culture, rap music has served as a pathway for social mobility for many black and Latinx youth.
These new cultural forms eventually spread beyond New York to all regions of the United States as artists from Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, and Chicago began releasing rap music with their own distinct sounds. Black and Latinx youth, many of them Caribbean immigrants, created this new cultural form in response to racism, poverty, urban renewal, deindustrialization, and inner-city violence. Rap is the musical practice of hip hop culture that features vocalists, or MCs, reciting lyrics over an instrumental beat that emerged out of the political and economic transformations of New York City after the 1960s.